Companeros, your Westing writer in residence has a day job too, and it happens to be working as a copywriter for political operations. Basically I do grunt writing work for politicians who need speeches, statements, endorsement questionnaires, and that kind of thing. It's a pretty interesting sort of freelance writing during this time of year, because you get to watch what's happening in local political races from the box seats. I live in Pilsen, which is in the 25th Ward of the great City of Chicago, which is engaged in a particularly significant aldermanic race that will culminate on February 27 at the ballot boxes. The word on the street is SAY NO TO HDO!

Now you need a brief history lesson. Way back in the eons of time, when King Richard Daley II had recently won succession to King Harold's crown and restored the House of Daley to power, all the feudal lords were required to swear fealty before the throne of the King. Among those who came most voluntarily to swear on the sword were a group of Latino alderman. Why?

This was fifteen years ago and at that time the Hispanic contribution to Chicago politics had been disproportionately small to say the least. One of the unuttered knocks on beloved King Harold's record was his marked inability or unwillingness to build a Latino leadership structure in his operation. It was for that reason that Richie Daley used his southwest side machine and his father's relationships to form a Latino political organization to help him in his run for mayor. He and some early captains created HDO , the Hispanic Democratic Organization, with the ennobled aim of empowering Latinos to take their ranks in the city's political apparatus.

I suppose the only way to say what happened next is to say that the organization that formed was something like the Hispanics For Daley Democratic Organization and that meant two things. One, any Hispanics with pre-existing contact with the larger Daley apparatus were sitting pretty. And two, anybody else who wanted to play their way in better show up at court in person and explain why. What this dynamic created over time was a restricted gene pool in Latino politics in the city, which might have worked out fine for everybody if the Hispanic (see Mexican) population hadn't kept growing so fast, or may even have worked out fine if the federal regulation of Chicago political tactics (see Hired Truck ) hadn't become the order of the day.

Reading the papers, not even with any particular voracity, you might have already figured out how things have wound up. HDO was a "first generation" political operation and as such had to do the dirty work for the city. They won the right to run Streets and San and with it the rights to use it as a patronage operation in their wards. Obviously, nobody is owning that, particularly not the Mayor, who didn't know about it. But it's plain, owned or not, that it happened, the Hired Truck scandal being the jagged tip of that iceberg.